Seagate MACH.2 Multi Actuator Tech Reaches 480MB/s HDDs

We've mentioned this tech from Seagate before, MACH.2 Multi-Actuator technology, basically two magnetic heads and a bit of technology that sounds familiar to raid. Seagate demonstrated up to 480MB/s sustained throughput - the fastest ever from a single hard drive, and 60 percent faster than a 15K drive.

Today Seagate said its new MACH.2™ Multi Actuator technology has enabled them to set a new hard drive speed record, demonstrating up to 480MB/s sustained throughput — the fastest ever. Seagate formally introduced its MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology yesterday, which has now been deployed in development units for customer testing prior to productization. Seagate’s advanced engineering team also announced a breakthrough in the demonstrated reliability of its HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology hard drives. Seagate revealed that its HAMR read/write heads have achieved unprecedented results in long-term reliability tests that surpass customer requirements by a factor of 20. Continue below for more details.

Seagate’s technology team reports at OCP that partners have begun integration development with both our HAMR and our MACH.2 Multi Actuator technologies. Several partners displayed these advanced technologies, the new Seagate Exos X14 drive, and Seagate Nytro Data Center NVMe SSD Series drives in their booth demos. Seagate engineers have set a new record for how fast data can stream data off of a hard drive. With a Seagate hard drive equipped with its MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology, Seagate has demonstrated up to 480MB/s sustained throughput — the fastest ever from a single hard drive, and 60 percent faster than a 15K drive.

Seagate MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology doubles IOPS performance in a single hard drive by using two independent actuators that can transfer data to the host computer concurrently. As higher areal densities on future hard drives put downward pressure on performance, Seagate’s MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology will more than offset these pressures. That means customers with data-intensive applications will continue to enjoy the highest levels of hard drive performance, while they simultaneously keep up with the need to manage vast, ever-increasing quantities of data. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By enabling the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive in parallel, simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive, more than offsetting any issues of reduced data availability that would otherwise arise with higher capacities. The industry’s standard specification for nearline hard drive reliability anticipates that a drive will be able to transfer 550TB per year, or 2750TB total over a five-year period. On a hard drive with 18 read/write heads, each head is expected to transfer 152TB reliably over five years. Seagate’s development team has now demonstrated a single HAMR read/write head transferring data for 6000 hours reliably, equaling 3.2 Petabytes of data transferred on a single head. That’s more than 20 times the amount of data required by the spec.

How does this translate to a HAMR drive deployed in a data center?

“On any hard drive meeting the industry specification, if all heads on the drive were writing 100 percent of the time in the field — which, of course, they do not — that would mean each head had written 152TB per head in total,” explained Jason Feist, Seagate’s director of Enterprise Product Planning. “Or to put it into Petabytes: the customer requirement is that a single head can write 0.152 Petabytes; we’re already writing 3.2 Petabytes on a single HAMR head.”

Together, Seagate HAMR and MACH.2 Multi Actuator technologies maximize drive capacity while maintaining performance levels above data center customers’ specifications. That’s the near future we’d face, without the combined advances of higher capacities made possible by HAMR and the fast access to this enormous data pool made possible by Seagate MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology. Feist noted that HAMR and MACH.2 are just the latest crucial advances made by our scientists and engineers, part of Seagate’s long history developing breakthrough enabling technologies. Seagate’s HAMR and MACH.2 Multi Actuator technologies are on track to work together, enabling new-generation capacities and performance. These technologies are being implemented in the near future in Seagate Exos enterprise hard drives.

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#5570636 Posted on: 08/03/2018 08:54 AM
Finally. Now they need to add a third read head for triple buffering LOL

wavetrex
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#5570652 Posted on: 08/03/2018 10:48 AM
Very much needed !Even at QLC, SSD's still won't touch HDD capacities and price/GB anytime soon. And that is before HAMR!

And yes, there may be lots of moving parts, but it really doesn't matter if they can move reliably. Strangely, most of the failures in HDD's aren't the moving parts, but the electronics driving those movements...

It was about time to increase HDD speeds !Can't wait to have some of these new Hydra-Disk-Drives in my video workstation, and copy those huge 4K video files twice or three times as fast.

Silva
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#5570653 Posted on: 08/03/2018 10:50 AM

Too much moving parts for my preference.

Are you 12? HDD's have been the working horses for decades.True, tech moves forward and with it new and better hardware emerges, but still.HDD are still the best cost/capacity in relation to SSD cost/speed.We are in a transition faze, it will take another 10 years to (maybe) start using HDD less.Some companies still use tape recorders due to cost/density reasons.

sverek
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#5570699 Posted on: 08/03/2018 01:42 PM

Are you 12?

That's deep.

slyphnier
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#5570713 Posted on: 08/03/2018 03:23 PM
Are you 12? HDD's have been the working horses for decades.True, tech moves forward and with it new and better hardware emerges, but still.HDD are still the best cost/capacity in relation to SSD cost/speed.We are in a transition faze, it will take another 10 years to (maybe) start using HDD less.Some companies still use tape recorders due to cost/density reasons.

for hdd, head/actuator crash(failure) is one common thing that causing hdd failure

this new hdd using multi(dual) actuator, while they might change something but it also not proved it going to be more reliable whatsoever

if basically they only add more actuator and not changing the rest, then more actuator can increase failure rate

waltc3
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#5570727 Posted on: 08/03/2018 04:48 PM
Soon we will need to see SATA 4, or beyond, as I am assuming this testing may be bottlenecked by SATA 3--or, maybe not. Trying to put these puppies in a 2-3 drive RAID 0 config should be interesting. Hope it pans out--to stay relevant in performance terms with .M2 and 2.5" SSDs they are going to have to make the economics right...! Nothing drives innovation like competition, eh?

MegaFalloutFan
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#5570796 Posted on: 08/03/2018 11:25 PM
I would of preferred to make the HDD same width but bit taller and add a full head on opposite corner that reads all the platters at once, so that will quadruple the speeds, instead of two heads like now that each have half the platters, they will have full head set, and each will read all platters at once, and will be spread by doing 50% of the platter each, so they will do twice the data and half the movement.And it can go even faster, if they utilize this technology they used now, so two full heads on opposite side, each head split into 2 moving separately like now

Reddoguk
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#5570830 Posted on: 08/04/2018 02:04 AM
As long as there is a 5 year warranty then what's the problem. Need to just make them 300mb/s plus and they'll be golden at a decent price point.

sverek
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#5570837 Posted on: 08/04/2018 03:08 AM
I still don't understand how this fast HDD benefit mere consumers. As far as you have SSD for OS and programs, you don't need fast drive for data (movies, music, etc...)

This could be good for data centers, since those probably can store lots of data and still access it fast. Consumers don't need 10TB fast HDD. 512GB ssd for OS, games and programs is usually enough.

Carfax
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#5570841 Posted on: 08/04/2018 05:24 AM
I was an SSD holdout for a long time, as I was turned off by their cost per GB ratio and I had my trusty WD Raptors in RAID 0. Now I have a Samsung 960 Pro and a 850 Pro, and there's no way in hell I would ever go back to using HDDs!

Noisiv
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#5570883 Posted on: 08/04/2018 10:24 AM
Say what you want but fundamental or disruptive innovations in a mature product (like HD), is almost unheard of.

This is F***** IMPRESSIVE

tsunami231
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#5570932 Posted on: 08/04/2018 05:41 PM
maybe I will get one these to replace my old barracuda drive, if the price is still the price of hdd per 1b